Wednesday, 5 July 2017

M107: A globular with some dark patches

Globular clusters are extremely dense balls of stars. They may contain hundreds of thousands of stars in a volume that's only twenty times the distance from Earth to the nearest star across. Imagine Venus, Jupiter and Sirius and how brightly they're shining in the sky. To anyone living in a globular cluster the sky would be filled with such very bright stars, as many as there are camera flashes during a football World Cup penalty shootout. Some would even be brighter than the full Moon! So after all it's very unlikely that these globulars contain life because any planetary system would be severely disrupted by the tidal forces from nearby stars. Similar as these fascinating objects may seem at first sight, careful observation through a telescope will show you that they all have a character of their own.

When speaking of M107's character, it's an odd globular in many ways. First of all, it's unusually loose: it ranks X on a density scale from I to XII. Second, it lies almost right above the centre of our Milky Way. And third, it's one of the few globular clusters that show dark patches in them, as you can also see on my sketch. Before you get carried away, these dark patches have nothing to do with M107 whatsoever. Since this globular hovers only slightly above our galactic plane, some of its light is being blocked by our Milky Way's interstellar dust. Infrared images, on the other hand, reveal that it's just as round and regular as most other globulars.

M107 was only posthumously added to Messier's catalogue and, as it turns
out, it was also the last astronomical object that Charles Messier and
his assistant Pierre Méchain discovered, despite the Messier list
containing 110 objects. Messier was an 18th century comet hunter and for
years he was browsing the night's sky. When he accidentally stumbled
upon a fuzzy patch which he identified as not being a comet (since it
always remained immobile at the same position in the sky), he wrote its
coordinates and description down in a list so he wouldn't confuse it
with a real comet. This list became the first catalogue of astronomical objects and is still the most popular reference among amateur astronomers.

This particular globular cluster's one of the least-known Messier objects and it's also reasonably faint. You may already spot it with a pair of binoculars under a sufficiently dark sky, but it will remain difficult to see. In order to resolve some stars in it, you're going to need at least an 8" telescope. With my binoscope this cluster appeared completely resolved but remained fairly dim. Yet, it's a fascinating object.